Stay ahead with the world's most comprehensive technology and business learning platform.

With Safari, you learn the way you learn best. Get unlimited access to videos, live online training,
learning paths, books, tutorials, and more.

Chapter 1.

Birth of a Spam King

People are stupid, Davis Wolfgang Hawke thought as he stared at the
nearly empty box of swastika pendants on his desk. It was April 22, 1999, two days after the
one-hundredth anniversary of Adolph Hitler’s birth. Dozens of orders for the red-and-black
necklaces had been pouring into his Knights of Freedom (KOF) Nationalist Party web site every week since he built it nine months ago. The
demand nearly outstripped what his supplier could provide, but Hawke wasn’t celebrating his
e-commerce success. As he stuffed the remaining pendants into padded envelopes and addressed
them, Hawke gazed out the window of his mobile home at the hazy South Carolina sky and
thought: This is the ultimate hypocrisy. If even half of these people actually
joined the party, I would have a major political movement. Instead, all they want is a
pretty, shiny pendant.

And if a snoopy reporter for the local paper hadn’t recently blown his cover, Hawke
might not have been spending all of the web site’s income on rent, telephone, and
electricity bills for the double-wide just off Highway 221 in Chesnee. But Hawke was forced
to move into the trailer in March, after secretly operating KOF.net for six months from the
dorm room his parents paid for at Wofford College in nearby Spartanburg. Hawke had always been an anomaly at the pricey Methodist
school, with his penchant for dressing all in black, wearing his dark hair in a ponytail,
and sporting a push-broom mustache. But the 20-year-old junior had managed to hold down a
3.8 grade point average as a double major in German and history without anyone knowing he
was also the founder and chief executive director of the Knights of Freedom. His room in
Shipp Hall had been festooned with Nazi flags, Hitler videos, and a collection of knives,
but Hawke did no proselytizing on campus. In fact, he had little social contact with other
students.

Although his ultimate goal was one day to be elected the nation’s first white-power
president, Hawke knew he had to lay some groundwork before his philosophy would become
mainstream. That task would make him a target for leftists and the media. To shield himself,
even with party comrades and web site visitors, Hawke used the pseudonym “Bo
Decker" and listed a post office box in Walpole, Massachusetts as the Knights of
Freedom mailing address.

Over a thousand people signed up for his monthly email newsletter, the White
Pride News Service. Some 200 people joined as dues-paying members, paying five
dollars a month for a membership card, a KOF armband, a videotape of speeches by Decker, and
a subscription to the newsletter. Not bad for a movement that had been unheard of a year
earlier. In fact, the Anti-Defamation League had recently said that KOF was the
fastest-growing neo-Nazi group in the United States. Using the alias Bo Decker, Hawke had
introduced the world to the Knights of Freedom in an August 1998 posting to several online
discussion groups: “We must band together in unity to defend our Race. Either we stand
together and battle for the right to racial existence or we will be wiped out by
international Jewry and their nigger police.”

As Hawke saw it, the Knights of Freedom had two major things going for it: its web site
and his brains. The KOF.net site, dressed all in black like its owner, was the best
white-power site on the Internet. Besides the merchandise section, there was a chat room,
press release section, message board, and automated sign-up forms—all the bells and
whistles. At one point, Hawke even posted a note on the site’s home page offering to provide
web design and hosting to other white-power groups. Hawke and his lieutenants also knew how
to use the Internet for promotion. They worked newsgroups and discussion lists, talking up
the Knights of Freedom and its web site. Hawke had put an automatic hit counter on the front
page of KOF.net, and he got a kick out of checking the traffic statistics every day. It
intrigued him that you could publish a message in a newsgroup or send out the newsletter
emails and then a few hours later watch the bar graphs on the stats page suddenly shoot
up.

As for Hawke’s mind, it was quantitative, analytical. It made him a top student in high
school and a formidable chess player, and it made his college studies a snap. He could think
several moves ahead of his opponents.

However, in a moment of hubris, Hawke posted a large photograph of himself on the front
page of KOF.net. It showed the lanky Hawke dressed in a Nazi uniform, with his arm
outstretched in a “Heil Hitler” salute. When a Wofford student was out web surfing one
evening in early February and happened to run across the site, Hawke was undone.

Soon a front-page exposé appeared in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal
that fingered Hawke as the head of KOF. It said that he used the site for recruiting and to
stoke racist fervor among party members, who addressed him as “Commander.” According to the
article, the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that monitors hate groups, had
been tracking him since he was in high school in Westwood, Massachusetts.

But what hit Hawke like a punch to the gut was a matter-of-fact statement in the article
attributed to Mark Potok, the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Potok told the paper
that Hawke was a Jew who, to hide his heritage, had changed his name from Andrew Britt
Greenbaum upon graduating from high school in 1996.

The article buried what would become Hawke’s standard rebuttal to the charges: that his
father, Hyman Andrew Greenbaum, was only one-quarter Jewish. And it omitted altogether that
Hawke believed his true biological father was a German immigrant named Dekker with whom his
mother had had an affair. Either way, Hawke knew he wouldn’t have been considered Jewish
even under Hitler’s classification. As Hawke wrote in his application for a change of
identity: “I have always responded to a different name and I wish to formalize my name prior
to attending college in the fall as to avoid confusion.”[1]

The article couldn’t have come at a worse time. For the past few months, the Knights of
Freedom had begun to attract attacks from other white-power groups. Some, jealous of Hawke’s
Internet skills, had taken to calling him the “Net Nazi” and were claiming that the KOF was
a virtual movement with no real world presence. Others, suspicious of the KOF’s quick rise
into the limelight, posted mocking replies to his messages in online newsgroups. To Hawke’s
detractors, the falsehoods about his Jewish ancestry would provide delicious irony and
damaging ammunition.

Indeed, the insults about him being a “Kosher Nazi” had already begun. Tom Metzger, head
of the White Aryan Resistance—the same Tom Metzger whose name Hawke had placed in the hidden
“MetaTag” code at KOF.net to bring in traffic from search engines—was quoted in the
Herald-Journal article as saying, “If he is a Jew, he will have no
stature left. People he is involved with will have nothing to do with him.”

When the article appeared, part of Hawke was mortified that everything he had built was
about to collapse. But he tried to stay cool-headed. He contemplated his damage-control
options. He wouldn’t say anything about the article to people in the Knights of Freedom
unless they asked. And if they did, he’d remind them that the whole matter was a creation of
the Jewish-controlled media or an effort by the Zionist Occupied Government, as he liked to
refer to the controlling powers in the U.S., designed to undermine proud Aryan people.
Bottom line, any publicity is good publicity, Hawke would tell his followers.

Fortunately for Hawke, people at Wofford were focused more on Hawke’s message than on
the revelations about him as a messenger. To his relief, he inspired fear, not laughter.
Wofford professors abandoned their syllabi that day and instead devoted their classes to
discussing the Knights of Freedom web site and the group’s leader. Then, in the evening,
around 300 Wofford students—nearly a third of the student body—gathered in the college’s
auditorium to hold a candlelight vigil to show their opposition to racism and
bigotry.

While Wofford’s dedication to principles of free speech prevented administrators from
expelling Hawke, they were eager to relax the college rules and allow him to move off
campus. In early March, he signed a lease for the cramped trailer in the woods, fifteen
miles from the college. Hawke knew he was finished with Wofford; he’d complete the semester,
but that would probably be the end of his college career. Bigger things awaited him. The
publicity train started by the local paper was chugging along. The Boston
Globe published a story about him in late February that put the Knights of
Freedom on a national stage. Even Rolling Stone wanted to send a
reporter to interview him.

There was a silver lining to Hawke’s move off campus. A woman he had met in an online
chat room offered to move to South Carolina and serve as party secretary. Her name was
Patricia Lingenfelter. She was a beautiful Aryan, smart and tough—a green belt in karate—and
ten years older than Hawke. Once he was out of the dorms, Hawke invited her to stay with him
in Chesnee. To keep up appearances, he insisted that she still refer to him as “Commander”
around other party comrades, but everyone knew Hawke and Patricia were lovers.

In late March, Hawke decided it was time to host an assembly of comrades in Chesnee. He
wanted the First Party Congress to happen on the one hundredth anniversary of Hitler’s
birthday, but April 20 didn’t coincide with Wofford’s spring break. So he scheduled the
meeting the week before the Fuhrer’s 100 th. While fewer than a
dozen party members showed up, the atmosphere was charged by the presence of a camera crew
from ABC News’s Hard Copy program, which broadcast a snippet of Hawke’s
rousing speech, along with footage of party members marching around outside his trailer in
their Nazi regalia.

Meanwhile, out in Colorado two kids at Columbine High School celebrated Hitler’s
birthday by going on a shooting rampage, killing twelve people, including themselves.
Suddenly, TV news producers were grabbing for their Rolodexes, and Hawke’s name, after his
strong performance on Hard Copy, was coming out on top. A crew from the
Fox Files television news program showed up at the trailer the next
day to interview Hawke about the Knights of Freedom and his insights into the
killings.

The media likes to buy and sell fear, Hawke thought as he and
Patricia watched the Fox report on the TV in his trailer that evening on April 22. The
program was trying to spin the Columbine massacre as a racially motivated hate crime, but
Hawke wouldn’t play along. At one point in the program, the Fox interviewer asked Hawke, who
was wearing his Nazi uniform, if he ever hugged his father.

Hawke said no, and added that he didn’t hug his mother either.

“Why not?”

“I never felt the need for physical contact of that sort,” said Hawke.

“Did you feel the need for human affection?”

“Human affection is not something that I value at the moment, or then, or ever.”

“Do you believe in love?”

“Sure, I believe in love, but I don’t believe that I can ever have time for that. That’s
a human emotion,” replied Hawke.

“Do you think that people would see that as sad or unfortunate, that here’s a young man
that says that he never felt any love for anyone growing up, or never hugged his mom or
dad?”

“I don’t really care what they have to say,” Hawke answered.

When the program was over, Hawke switched off the TV. Patricia said she was going to
head into town for a quick food run and to gas up the car. Hawke turned on the computer on
his desk and was waiting for it to boot up when the phone rang. It was his mother. He hadn’t
spoken to her for several months.

“Are you happy now?” she yelled at him.

“What do you mean?” he replied.

Peggy Greenbaum said she had seen the Fox Files segment. “How do
you know your web site didn’t cause those boys to go crazy in Columbine? It makes me sick to
think that you might have spurred them on,” she said.

Hawke considered her question. To him, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were probably just
disgruntled teens taking revenge against a school system that was force-feeding them the
same old liberal nonsense day after day, year after year. But before he had a chance to
explain this to his mother, she interrupted.

“I hope you’re happy now,” she hissed again, and hung up on him.

Hawke sat down at his desk. His parents had been paying his tuition and living expenses,
but it was obvious he could no longer rely on them for anything. Yet he knew that if he was
going to realize his dream of building the Knights of Freedom into a major political
movement and creating an Aryan homeland out west, he’d need a lot of money. Hawke’s personal
savings—acquired through generous holiday gifts from his parents and other relatives—would
carry him for a while. He was pretty certain that his grandparents on both sides of the
family would someday will him a small fortune, maybe close to a million dollars. But in the
meantime, there were bills to pay.

Hawke started up the web browser on his computer and typed in the address of the eBay
auction site. He occasionally visited the site to check out auctions of Nazi
paraphernalia—he’d picked up one of his SS uniforms that way. But this time he wasn’t going
to the site to shop. Instead, he surfed to the section of the site for creating a new
account, and began rapidly filling out the form.

Hawke paused when he got to the section asking him to specify a username. After some
thought he typed in “antiqueamerica”—a sturdy name that wouldn’t provoke any suspicion. Then
he launched himself machinelike into the repetitive task of setting up auctions for the
knives, buckles, pendants, uniforms, and other Nazi gear he’d been selling at
KOF.net.

When Patricia returned to the trailer an hour or so later, the change in Hawke wasn’t
visible. But he had begun his transformation from neo-Nazi organizer to Internet
spammer.

The Education of an Anti-Spammer

Susan Gunn’s first personal computer seemed preloaded with an endless supply of junk
email. Almost from the moment she first signed on to America Online, even before she had
given her newly minted email address to friends and relatives, Gunn began receiving
electronic messages from total strangers who wanted to sell her all manner of products she
didn’t want, including pornography, body-part enlargement, and software that would enable
her to enter the exciting and rewarding business of junk email.

Who are these people and how did they get my address? wondered
Gunn, a resident of Stanton, California, a small, palm-tree-studded city built on land
originally intended as a sewage farm for neighboring Anaheim. Gunn had bought the PC
ostensibly to computerize some of her work as the property manager of a condominium complex
owned by her father. But for Gunn, divorced and in her mid-forties, the computer was also a
link from her sometimes too-quiet home office in the gated community to the brave new world
known as the Internet.

It was late 1998. AOL had recently acquired its rivals Netscape and CompuServe and
boasted around 15 million members. The dot-com bubble was still inflating rapidly, as new
users such as Gunn swarmed online and began making purchases. But e-commerce wasn’t only
being conducted by high-profile dot-coms such as eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo!. Entrepreneurs of
all types were trying to cash in on the information superhighway, including, apparently, the
anonymous folks who had somehow gotten her email address, which they felt entitled them to
barge through her virtual front door whenever they wanted.

At first Gunn blamed AOL for the messages. She assumed the online service had sold her
name as soon as she signed up. But when she phoned the company to complain, a customer
support representative assured her that was not the case. The rep said to forward any
unwanted messages to a special email address, and AOL would investigate. For a few weeks,
Gunn dutifully obliged, but the junk email kept on coming. In some cases the incoming spam
stated that if she wanted to be removed from the sender’s list, she needed to visit a
special web page and type in her email address. But that had no effect. And whenever she hit
the “reply” button and told the spammers to knock it off, her replies went unanswered or
were returned as undeliverable. Either the return address on the original message didn’t
exist, or the mailbox on the other end was crammed to capacity.

Gunn’s previous computer experience had consisted of plugging numbers into spreadsheets
during a stint in an accounting firm. So she had no way of knowing that her mysterious spam
problem was likely a consequence of having wandered into AOL’s online chat rooms while they
were being harvested by spammers. Using special “spambot” programs, junk emailers were able
to pluck thousands of AOL addresses out of the service’s chat rooms in minutes. Similar
harvesting programs were designed to automatically scour web pages and online bulletin
boards looking for telltale “@” symbols and add the addresses to a database.

Then again, Gunn might have been the target of a dictionary attack, a technique used by junk emailers to guess their way into Internet users’
in-boxes. Most spam mailing programs could blast out millions of messages to automatically
generated addresses. By compiling various combinations of common names and numbers, followed
by the domain of a big Internet service provider, such as “@aol.com,” spam software could
generate a small percentage of actual working addresses.

Little did Gunn know that by replying to junk emails that arrived in her in-box, she was
actually making the problem worse by confirming to the senders that they had found a live
body, thus becoming what is known to junk emailers as a “verified” email address. Because
she had responded, it was likely that her address had been added to mailing lists marketed
to other spammers. She even received a junk email advertising a CD-ROM claiming to contain
91 million verified email addresses (almost one third the population of the United States). Spammers, it seemed,
had no use for target marketing.

Gunn wondered if there was some official agency charged with dealing with spam
complaints, such as a Better Business Bureau for spammers. She asked about it in an AOL chat
room where PC users could get real-time help for their computer problems from more
sophisticated users. No one there had heard of such an agency, although someone provided her
with an email address at the Federal Trade Commission to which she could forward copies of
spam.

“Frankly, I just delete the stuff. It’s not worth the trouble to report it,” he told
her.

But Gunn wasn’t able to ignore her junk email problem. The type who went ballistic over
people who litter, she would chase down and give a tongue lashing to anyone who tossed a
crumpled up McDonalds bag on her property. To her, spamming was the same kind of
anti-social, selfish act. In their efforts to reach a handful of interested customers, bulk
emailers were blithely leaving their trash all over her part of the Internet. But the
cowards, with their fake return addresses, left Gunn no way to run them down and share a few
choice words.

One self-proclaimed computer expert on AOL suggested that Gunn get advice from an
Internet bulletin board frequented by Internet system administrators and other sophisticated
computer users united in their hatred of spam. The group was known as Nanae (pronounced NAH-nay), short for “news admin net-abuse email,” and was one of
the thousands of topics available from a free Internet discussion service called Usenet.
Using a program called a newsreader, which was also built into the AOL software, Usenet
participants around the world were able to read and contribute to online discussion
newsgroups dedicated to everything from raising ferrets to practicing Far Eastern
religions.

“But watch your step. There can be some real kooks in Nanae,” he warned, noting that
angry spammers sometimes dropped in on the newsgroup too.

By early 1999, the ratio of junk to legitimate email had made Gunn’s AOL mailbox
practically unusable. Fed up, she decided to pay Nanae a visit and seek advice. At the
start, she treaded cautiously, reading but not joining the discussion. (One of the first
messages she read warned that Nanae denizens did not suffer fools easily: “Wear your
flame-proof underwear...never go Nanae-ing without ‘em!”) Unlike some hobby-related Usenet
newsgroups she had frequented in the past, Nanae was very busy, often receiving hundreds of
new postings every day. Some of the participants used their real names, but many posted
under aliases such as “Dark Jedi,” “Sapient Fridge,” “Morely Dotes,” and “Tsu Do Nimh.” Most
of the Nanae folk seemed to be men, although there were apparently a handful of women who
frequented it as well. Few seemed to be fellow AOL users and instead posted their messages
from obscure Internet service providers (ISPs) she had never heard of.

It wasn’t clear to Gunn what exactly these people did for a living. From the technical
jargon they slung around, she assumed most were either computer programmers or longtime
Internet users. A few seemed to be fighting spam in an official capacity as system
administrators: an anonymous user who went by the online alias Afterburner, for example,
ended all of his postings with a signature line, or sig, that stated he handled spam
complaints for Erols, a mid-sized ISP in the Washington, D.C. area. Later, she learned that
Afterburner was one of the chosen few Nanae regulars who had received a Golden Mallet
Award, a tongue-in-cheek honor given to longtime spam fighters for meritorious
conduct. A special site known as the Pantheon listed the names of recipients and featured an
illustration of a large gilded hammer smashing down on a map of the world.

Nanae had no official charter as far as Gunn could tell. The closest thing she could
find to a mission statement was a message posted by Afterburner that summed up Nanae’s
purpose as “a cathartic release mechanism and a clearinghouse of info.” Most of the postings
contained businesslike reports of spam sightings or matter-of-fact complaints about ISPs
that were slow to deal with spammers using their networks. But some messages were playful,
such as one she spotted with the subject line “Confirmed Kill,” which gleefully reported on
an ISP that had responded to complaints by cutting off service to a junk emailer.

While Gunn easily picked up the Internet lingo used in AOL’s chat rooms and instant
messaging programs—overused shorthand such as LOL for “laughing out
loud” or BRB for “be right back”—she was unprepared for the jargon in
Nanae. The private slang of participants apparently wasn’t developed for speed typing so
much as to solidify spam fighters as a clique, or at least to add humor or spice to their
postings. Several messages discussed the proper way to use a LART—code
for “loser attitude readjustment tool,” which she learned was another name for an email
notifying ISPs of customers who were spamming. A LART was also referred to as a “mallet,”
since it was sometimes used to clobber delinquent ISPs into action against spammers. (Hence
the Golden Mallet awarded to top anti-spammers.)

The newsgroup was also full of talk about UCE (unsolicited
commercial email) and of spammers who were violating the TOS (terms of
service) or AUP (acceptable use policy) of an Internet service
provider. (Almost all ISPs specifically forbade their customers from sending spam.) Other
postings discussed the various ways to munge one’s email address in
Usenet postings—such as by adding the phrase “nospam” next to the “@” sign—to thwart
harvesting efforts by spammers.

Especially puzzling were messages whose subject lines were prefixed with the letters
C&C. One poked fun at Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski, whom
the message referred to as a “Congress critter.” In 1998 Murkowski had proposed legislation
governing bulk email, and many Nanae participants were vehemently opposed to the bill,
fearing that it might actually legitimize some forms of spam. Weeks later Gunn learned that
C&C was Nanae shorthand for “coffee and cats" and was a warning to others that a humorous message followed that might
produce sudden laughter and thus the spilling of coffee and upsetting of cats near the
reader.

After following Nanae discussions over the course of a few days, Gunn stumbled onto a
web site that contained answers to common questions about junk email. The spam FAQ (frequently asked questions), as Internet gurus called it, provided a gold mine
of information on how to analyze spam messages to determine the true Internet address of the
computer that sent them. There were also tips on how to track down the owners of web site
addresses or domains by using a service known as whois, which provided phone numbers and
other contact information for the individual who registered the domain. Gunn also read up on
how to file a complaint with an Internet service provider when one of its customers was
sending spam.

But perhaps the most important anti-spam weapon she discovered was a specialized
Internet search engine called Deja News. Gunn had been using AOL’s search service, as well as a site called Google, to
find material published on web pages. But Deja News was different; it gave users the ability
to search a complete archive dating back to the 1980s of nearly every newsgroup in
existence, including old Nanae discussions. For spam trackers, the newsgroup search engine
enabled them to sift through old spam sightings and determine, for example, whether a
spammer was a repeat offender, or whether an ISP had been warned in the past about chronic
spammers. (Deja News was acquired by Google in 2001 and renamed Google Groups.)

But, as Gunn soon discovered, junk email opponents didn’t confine themselves to filing
complaints with ISPs. Some also resorted to more militant tactics.

Ho, Ho, Ho, the Nazis Didn’t Show

In a matter of days, orders from Davis Hawke’s eBay auctions started to roll in. He
found that buyers, caught up in the excitement of the auction, were often willing to bid
more than double the price he’d charge for the same item at the KOF site. And since eBay was
brokering the deal, there was less of a chance of someone ripping him off with a bad check.
The new, tax-free cash flow helped allay his fears about having to take a humiliating
civilian job that summer, such as flipping burgers at McDonalds or mowing lawns for the
ground crew at Wofford.

As classes finally ended in mid-May 1999, Hawke turned his attention to drafting what he
called the Millennium Plan—a long-term strategy for turning the Knights of Freedom into a
mainstream political party. The first step would be a new name, the American Nationalist
Party (ANP), and a new web site, ANParty.com. To broaden the movement’s appeal, Hawke
decided he’d drop the Nazi graphics and replace them with American flags, bald eagles, and
other patriotic symbols. He’d phase out using the Bo Decker moniker. To cap off the change, that summer ANP members would assemble at the
group’s to-be-built training camp on some property owned by a comrade in Virginia. They’d
spend a weekend setting up a shooting range and an obstacle course. And there would be time
for camaraderie with other proud Aryans. Then, by the end of the summer, the ANP would stage
a massive rally in Washington, D.C., where he would give a speech in front of the White
House.

In preparation for the event, Hawke had been on the phone with city police and the
National Park Service about getting a demonstration permit. The bureaucrats seemed confused
by the name of Hawke’s group; he had to correct them several times when they referred to it
as the American Nazi Party or the Nationalist Movement. The city, apparently still jumpy
from a Ku Klux Klan march down Constitution Avenue in 1990 that resulted in injuries and arrests,
wanted an accurate estimate of how many protestors would assemble and a detailed plan about
where they would march and give speeches.

Since the White Pride News Service e-letter had over 1,600 subscribers, Hawke figured conservatively
that 300 members would be at the rally. That was the estimate he gave D.C. police anyway,
but Hawke secretly had his doubts. His top lieutenants—who comprised five people, including
Patricia—were gung ho about the event. But Hawke wasn’t sure about the rank and file. The
party’s member rolls had swollen quickly. But he had met only a handful of them face to
face. Would these people take an active interest in promoting the interests of the White
Race?

The previous November, Hawke had sent email to members announcing a January rally in
Andrews, North Carolina, in support of serial bomber Eric Robert Rudolph. Rudolph, whom
Hawke referred to in the email as an “Aryan Hero,” was a suspect in the 1996 bombings of an
abortion clinic and a gay nightclub and was thought to be hiding from federal authorities in
the woods surrounding Andrews.

“It’s time to stop talking and start acting!” Hawke had written, asking for an
electronic show of hands from those who would attend. “We MUST make it known to the citizens
of that town and to all the world that they are not alone in their struggle against world
Jewry and federal tyranny, that an organization FINALLY exists which will not allow these
crimes to continue!”

Hawke had been hoping for 200 volunteers to answer the call and make the midwinter trek
to Andrews. But when only a few emailed him to say they could come to North Carolina, he
quietly told them the rally for Rudolph had been called off.

One day in late May, Hawke was at his desk, musing about the logistics of the March on
Washington. What if, despite all his careful planning and propaganda, only a couple dozen
people showed up? What if the “Greenbaum development,” as he referred to all the bashing he
was taking from other neo-Nazis and the liberal media, had truly undermined his
leadership?

Hawke pushed those doubts out of his mind. Instead, he tried to focus on a more
manageable matter—a plan for boosting his income online. The eBay auctions had been
labor-intensive, and Hawke was curious about running his own Internet shop, without eBay’s
constraints and commissions. He typed the address of a domain registration service into his
web browser. Once there, he checked whether the name KnifeDepot.com was taken. Besides being
something of a fetish for Hawke, knives were the items doing best in his eBay auctions. But
the domain was already registered, as were KnifeMarket.com, KnifeShop.com, and nearly every
other variation.

Then he tried Knifed.com. It was still available, so Hawke pounced, registering his
first domain not connected to the white-power movement. To protect his image as the ANP’s
leader, Hawke listed Patricia as Knifed.com’s owner. His plan was to develop it into an
online megastore for all sorts of personal weaponry, including high-margin collectible
items.

The American Knife Depot, as he named the site, was little more than a list of items and their prices,
with a few pictures he had found in a clip art collection and some he had copied from other
sites. Shoppers couldn’t order online—they had to send a check to a post office box he had
opened in Chesnee. But it was a start.

Next, it was just a matter of letting the world know the knife site was there. Drawing
on a technique he had learned from promoting the Knights of Freedom site, Hawke seeded
several online discussion groups with messages about the American Knife Depot. The
messages—Hawke’s first batch of spam—were terse and largely in uppercase, a far cry from the
loquacious and colorful junk emails Hawke would broadcast by the millions a few years later.
“WE’VE GOT THEM ALL AT THE AMERICAN KNIFE DEPOT! Lowest prices in the industry, quick
shipping, top-quality - ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED,” shouted Hawke’s nascent spams.

With Patricia’s help, Hawke spent the early part of June getting the Knife Depot
operational while managing his eBay auctions. Only a few orders came in from the Knifed.com
web site, but Hawke’s auctions were buzzing. His office in the trailer had become a shipping
and receiving center, with his desk buried under cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, and rolls of
packing tape.

Despite the distractions, in late June Hawke finally managed to nail down a date for the
rally with the D.C. police—Saturday August 7. In just over a month, he would take the full
measure of the movement he had built. The prospect both thrilled and terrified him. None of
his white-power heroes—Metzger, Richard Butler, or Ben Klassen—had ever attempted such a
daringly public display of Aryan pride and unity. Then again, Hawke reminded himself, none
of them had harnessed the Internet the way he had. If all went well, the rally might even
draw members of other groups, and provide a coalescing point for all American
racialists.

In an email announcement, Hawke phrased the March on Washington as a challenge to ANP
members: “I’m going to be there whether one person stands by my side or whether one thousand
rally behind me. I’m going to be there whether I’m threatened, whether I’m shot at, whether
I’m ridiculed, or whether I’m slandered. I’m going to be there—no matter what.”

Hawke’s police-approved plan was to assemble party members in James Monroe Park at three
o’clock sharp. The comrades would greet each other with firm handshakes and salutes. There
would be drummers or perhaps bagpipes to inspire the gathering. When the assembly reached a
critical mass, with Hawke leading the charge they would march the six blocks or so down H
Street to Lafayette Park, just across the street from the White House. They’d probably face
heckling and even physical attacks along the route, but the police had promised to provide
flanking protection the entire way.

At the park, the crowd would pause in front of the statue of President Andrew Jackson,
and Hawke would give his speech, using a bullhorn to address the throng. Other party leaders
and representatives of other groups would follow. Finally, participants would cross
Pennsylvania Avenue and end the march with a picket directly in front of the White House.
Hawke had obtained a three-hour demonstration permit, so they would need to disperse by six
o’clock.

Word of the ANP’s rally traveled quickly throughout the Internet, and not just among
neo-Nazis. Several anti-fascist groups swung into action, putting their members on notice to
be ready. Everyone from the NAACP and the American Jewish Committee to the Latino Civil Rights Center was abuzz
with plans for counterdemonstrations advocating racial and religious tolerance.

A few days before the big weekend in August, Hawke and Patricia shipped some final
orders for jewelry and knives. Hawke did a couple of phone interviews about the upcoming
rally, including one with the Washington Post. Then he and Patricia
packed a suitcase and made the six-hour drive to Fredericksburg, Virginia. There, they would
stay at the home of “Doc” O’Dell, a party officer who had a farm about an hour from downtown
Washington. The farm was to become the ANP training compound and would be the layover for
demonstrators from out of state. With Patricia at the wheel, Hawke practiced reading his
speech aloud several times.

Upon their arrival, Major O’Dell, despite being some thirty years Hawke’s senior, dutifully pulled Hawke’s old
suitcase out of the trunk and carried it into the house. As O’Dell was setting the suitcase
down in the entry hall, Hawke saw him check the name on the luggage
tags—Greenbaum.[2] Hawke winced when he realized he had neglected to update the labels, but O’Dell
didn’t mention the matter.

Following Hawke’s instructions, O’Dell had set up a camping area in the fields beside
his house and had brought in food and drinks and even a rented Porta-Potty for the campers.
Two large rental vans stood in the driveway, ready to taxi demonstrators into D.C. Many of
the protestors would join them at a designated staging area at the edge of the city, from
which the D.C. police would bus them downtown. But on the eve of the march, only three party
members had arrived.

Just after two o’clock on the afternoon of August 7, over 2,000 D.C. police officers
took their positions, in full riot gear, along Pennsylvania Avenue and around Monroe Park.
Over 300 National Park Service police, with the support of Secret Service agents, also
patrolled the area. Even D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey was on the scene, wearing a helmet
and carrying a riot baton, seriously bothered by the million dollars the special police
force was costing the city.

More than a thousand counterprotestors surrounded the twenty-block area that had been
cordoned off by the police. The demonstrators were chanting and holding anti-Nazi, pro-love
signs. Many of them wore bandanas around their necks in anticipation of tear gas. Scores of
media people, who had staked out Monroe Park with their cameras, satellite uplink trucks,
and boom microphones, were taking it all in.

When the appointed hour arrived and the ANP still hadn’t made its appearance at the
park, everyone began to grow restless. Had the neo-Nazis decided to move their rally to
another location to avoid counterdemonstrators? Chief Ramsey stepped into the middle of H
Street, surrounded by media. He told them his department was ready, but the ANP might not
be, and he planned to give them all the time they needed to get to the park and hold their
rally.

But at the parking lot designated as the pick-up spot, city busses idled empty when a
lone American Nationalist Party member pulled up in a car just after three p.m. No sign of
anyone except a few bored police officers sipping iced coffee outside their vehicles.
Dressed in an SS uniform, the ANP member[3] walked up to the policemen and asked whether Davis Hawke and other party members
had been transported to the park yet.

The officers looked the neo-Nazi up and down. Then one replied with a smirk, “No sign of
your people, but there’s plenty of company waiting for you at Monroe.”

The policemen watched as the ANP member returned to the car. After a few minutes, the
vehicle pulled out of the lot and quickly headed away.

When word that the march had been called off reached Lafayette Square, counterprotestors
began to celebrate. In one section, a group of several hundred people joyously chanted, “Ho,
ho, ho, the Nazis didn’t show,” while others banged plastic drums and blew whistles.

By that time, Hawke and Patricia had already been back in Chesnee for hours. They had
climbed out the window of their first-floor bedroom in O’Dell’s farmhouse at three in the
morning, so Hawke wouldn’t have to face the humiliation. They drove straight home, stopping
only once for a fuel break. As the miles rolled past, Hawke had composed his letter of
resignation. He tried to channel the anger and embarrassment he felt into eloquence.
“Whether through laziness, cowardice, or lack of commitment, almost all of you have let down
the Party and the white race itself,” he chided the members who didn’t show up for the
march.

“The Party has failed to achieve the standards that I set forth one year ago, and as a
man of honor I must therefore resign my position as Leader and Party Chairman,” Hawke told
them. He closed by saying he would disable the party’s web site and his email account within
a few days.

Hawke posted the letter at the ANP site and emailed it to his list that evening. By the
time he went to bed, Hawke was already feeling better about the day’s events. It had been an
amazing twelve months since he first announced the Knights of Freedom on the Internet. He
believed he might someday reemerge on the political stage. But until then, he would step out
of the spotlight and turn his full attention to his Internet businesses. Freed from the
constraints of being a public persona, Hawke could finally allow his online ingenuity to run
wild.

Spamford Meets Hacker-X

From skimming old Nanae messages, Susan Gunn learned that anti-spammers were flush with
power when she found the newsgroup in early 1999. They had rallied to force Sanford Wallace,
the Internet’s biggest spammer, into retirement just the year before. Wallace, who was head
of Philadelphia-based Cyber Promotions, had emerged as a spam king in 1995 and boasted that his firm generated
twenty-five million junk emails per day on behalf of clients ranging from pornography sites
to spam-software vendors. By some estimates CyberPromo.com was responsible for 80 percent of
the spam on the Net.

Unlike most spammers who chose to remain in the shadows, Wallace, a large man in his
early twenties, regularly tangled with junk email opponents in Nanae discussions. Wallace
argued that he was an entrepreneur and that spamming was his First Amendment right. Although
he disliked being called a spammer—he preferred to say that he was in the bulk email
business—Wallace eventually embraced the nickname given him by anti-spammers: Spamford. But
while they may have admired his chutzpah, Nanae regulars abhorred Wallace’s business practices, which included falsifying the
return address on his spam messages, so that he wouldn’t have to deal with complaints or
bounces—the error messages returned by mail systems when they received an undeliverable
message.

Anti-spammers cheered in late 1996 and early 1997 when Wallace was hit by successive
lawsuits from a dozen ISPs. The litigation sought to establish some legal guidelines in what
had previously been uncharted waters. AOL argued that it was not obligated to deliver email
solicitations to its members from spammers such as CyberPromo. EarthLink alleged that
Wallace had violated state and federal business laws by incessantly spamming its
subscribers. EarthLink’s attorney, Pete Wellborn, a former college football star turned
high-tech lawyer, said CyberPromo was guilty of electronically trespassing on EarthLink’s
mail servers with its spam.

When Wallace hired a team of lawyers and announced he would fight the lawsuits, an
anonymous vigilante decided to take matters into his own hands. He hacked into the Cyber
Promotions web site and rummaged through the server. The attacker, who came to be known
simply as Hacker-X, gathered up a trove of information, including Wallace’s customer list and the
administrative password to the machine. Using a stolen account at a university, Hacker-X
then posted the information in a March 19, 1997, message to alt.2600, a newsgroup frequented by fans of the hacking magazine
2600. In confessing to the break-in, Hacker-X wrote that he was tired
of the flood of junk email from Cyber Promotions.

“Nobody else was fighting back ... So I decided to kick them and their clients in the
balls,” wrote the unidentified intruder. “This won’t end. Ever. Myself and others will
continue to expose spam operations weaknesses. To those who think that spam is a good idea:
think again.”

Using the opening created by Hacker-X, over the course of several days in late March,
other unidentified hackers repeatedly replaced the regular home page of Cyberpromo.com with
ones of their own design. One version of the defaced page featured an image of a can of
Hormel SPAM, a hyperlink to a page containing a list of customer accounts, and the words
“CYBERPROMO ... NOT JUST BULK EMAIL ... it’s SPAM.”[4]

Wallace was furious. He issued a press release that offered a $15,000 reward and
announced that he had alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about the intrusion.
But Wallace’s response only seemed to add fuel to the conflict. On April 6, Hacker-X struck
again. He posted another message to alt.2600, taunting Wallace (“that low-life, degenerate,
festering pile of goo”) and offering up more purloined information, including technical
datafiles required to provide Internet service to scores of other sites connected to Cyber
Promotions.

A few weeks later, the battle escalated. Someone on Nanae suggested anti-spammers join
in a “Cinco de Mayo Cyberpromo Mailbomb Day,” during which participants would coordinate a variety of attacks on Wallace’s
web site and email server beginning May 5. Similar calls to electronic arms were published
in other newsgroups, including misc.consumers, an online bulletin board for discussing
product reviews and other information about consumer issues.

When the so-called cyber-doomsday arrived, Cyberpromo.com—to the surprise of no
one—suddenly became unreachable by web surfers. Two days later, Wallace issued another press
release, stating that his company’s network was under attack by anti-spam hackers who had
also targeted an Internet router operated by Apex Global Information Systems
(AGIS), the Michigan ISP used by Cyber Promotions. The announcement said Cyber
Promotions was in the process of tracking the criminals, whom Wallace vowed to report to
federal authorities.

Wallace never found the hackers. But in apparent retaliation for the attacks, he
registered a new web site, NetScum.net. It contained an online directory with the names,
email addresses—and in some cases home street addresses and phone numbers—of hundreds of
spam fighters and other Internet users who had complained about Usenet postings and junk
email or were otherwise deemed too strident in their requirements that other Internet users
practice good online manners, or “netiquette.”

The NetScum directory was actually a reincarnation of a site created by unidentified Internet users
in 1996 and briefly hosted on a succession of obscure web pages. Among the entries in the
new edition was one on Afterburner, the respected Erols abuse-desk manager whose true name was revealed at the
site as Michael A. Hanks. (In one of his first acts at the ISP, Afterburner had convinced
Erols to cancel Wallace’s accounts there to protect the company’s reputation.) In an attempt
to discredit Afterburner, NetScum’s anonymous editors had dug up and reposted messages from
1996 by Afterburner’s girlfriend to a Usenet newsgroup named alt.sex.bondage. The postings
discussed her kinky sexual activities with what she referred to as her “master” Afterburner
and invited readers to visit her web site dedicated to “BDSM,” or
bondage/domination/sadomasochism. Although Afterburner laughed off his NetScum entry, he
became an infrequent contributor to Nanae after the incident.

The computerized attacks on Cyber Promotions and its ISP continued unabated throughout
the summer of 1997, leading some Nanae regulars to grow alarmed at the new trend toward
electronic violence by anti-spam vigilantes. Bill Mattocks, the recipient of a Golden Mallet
Award, argued that the spam wars must be fought ethically, with tactics that kept
anti-spammers on the moral high ground. On August 8, 1997, Mattocks, the operator of a
computer-consulting firm in Wisconsin, posted a four-page note to Nanae with the subject
line, “HACKERS, WISE UP!” In the message he noted that anti-spam crusaders had successfully
built a nonviolent grassroots movement opposed to junk email.

“We’re gaining converts who are not technically proficient with computers, but they are
on the Internet, and they hate spam, too. They are our allies. We must reach out to them and
teach them to teach others,” wrote Mattocks. He argued that the spam war was as much a
public relations fight as anything and chided Nanae readers who had used the information
from Hacker-X to attack Wallace.

“Shame on you,” he wrote. “You are going to bring discredit on the rest of the
anti-spammers. STOP IT!”

Mattocks’s advice went largely ignored. The very next day, an unidentified person hacked
into NetScum.net and replaced its usual home page with lewd messages about Wallace and Phil
Lawlor, the chief executive officer of AGIS, Wallace’s ISP. The site went offline shortly
thereafter, returned in its original form a few months later, and then went dark again for
good in the middle of October 1997, when AGIS cut off service to Cyber Promotions, citing
the constant attacks from anti-spammers. Six months later, after failing to line up a new
ISP, and finding himself hamstrung by legal settlements with ISPs that forbade him from ever
again spamming their members, Wallace announced his retirement.

In an April 1998 note on Nanae, Wallace apologized for his past actions and said that
newsgroup participants, in particular Mattocks and a popular anti-spammer named Jim
Nitchals, had earned his respect. “It is now clear to me that most of you *are really here*
to stop spam - not just for the thrill ride...BOTTOM LINE: You folks are WINNING the war
against spam.”

With Wallace vanquished, anti-spammers turned their attention to smaller foes, whom they
jokingly referred to as chickenboners. Unlike big operators such as Wallace who incorporated
their businesses and maintained office space with hired employees and other trappings of
legitimacy, chickenboners were imagined by spam fighters as living in mobile homes with a
personal computer on the kitchen table, surrounded by beer cans and buckets of take-out
fried chicken.

Veteran spam fighters tended to dismiss the skills of chickenboners, but Gunn was taking
no chances when she finally decided to join the ranks of anti-spammers in early 1999. Her
first move was to create a new screen name under her master AOL account, which was based on
a permutation of her real name, to protect her true identity. “Shiksa” was her first choice.
A few years back, the mother of a Jewish man Gunn had been dating called her that when the
woman thought Gunn was out of earshot. It was a derogatory Yiddish term used to describe
non-Jewish females, but Gunn liked the name. When she tried to sign up for Shiksa at AOL,
however, it was already taken. So she added an extra letter, and “Shiksaa,” her new anti-spam persona, was born.

[2] This detail first reported by Erik Hedegaard in “Rise and Fall of the Campus Nazi”
(Rolling Stone, 14 October 1999, p 81).

[3] In a May 2004 telephone interview, Hawke revealed that Jeff Krause, executive vice
president of the American Nationalist Party, was the only member of the ANP who showed
up at the march.

[4] The first use of the term “spam” to refer to junk email and Usenet messages appeared
in April 1993, after an incident involving a program called ARMM (Automated Retroactive
Minimal Moderation). Created by Richard Depew, a system administrator in Ohio, ARMM
accidentally posted 200 copies of the same message to the news.admin.policy newsgroup on
March 31, 1993. In response, an Internet user in Australia compared the ARMM incident to
a comedy routine from the British television series Monty Python’s Flying
Circus. First broadcast in 1970, the sketch features two customers at a
café who discover that every item on the menu includes Hormel’s SPAM canned meat. At one
point, a group of Vikings enters and loudly sings a song about “spam, lovely spam,
wonderful spam,” drowning out the café customers’ conversation.

With Safari, you learn the way you learn best. Get unlimited access to videos, live online training,
learning paths, books, interactive tutorials, and more.